Patrick Mulder

Power scalable Web apps with 100% JavaScript

Since its introduction, JavaScript was often seen as a limited object-oriented language that had many “bad” parts. The situation today is almost the opposite.

In competition with Java, C#, and Ruby, JavaScript is developing one of the largest ecosystems for web applications today. Why, as it seems, is a language made for web browsers gaining traction for building next-generation web applications on the server-side too?

In fact, you can see another example of disruptive innovation at work. As Clayton Christensen explained in his innovation theory, affordability and access are important drivers behind technology shifts. While the LAMP stack and its peers with Ruby, Python, Java, and C# provide the foundations for many server-side web applications today, JavaScript ships natively with web browsers, which enables a much larger part of the digital population to experiment with web development. In addition to lower costs of infrastructure and easier installation, companies get access to a larger pool of web developers.Read more…

Look beyond jQuery to an MV* approach

When you start building dashboards for interacting with data, such as calculators, editors, or result browsers, understanding JavaScript and client-side MVC becomes important. Why do you need an event-driven application design and a separation of interface state and behavior? Let me walk you through some examples.

You’ve probably seen seen simple example editors, where the browser acts as an editor for to-do lists. In these applications, you edit to-do items, consisting of a text and a state (pending or done). These small editors are very helpful for studying monitoring events from the keyboard and partially updating page content. These are the main principles for building applications in web browsers.

Once you going beyond to-do list editors, the requirements quickly increase. For example, you might work with multiple counters that observe the cursor position, or the number of words in a text box. You might need to support multiple editing modes or text formatters, or edit actions and state synchronization with a backend.